The world stood still.
Lyra blinked and blinked again. The sound of the crowd’s interest, the echo of Merrow’s name against the stone, and even the pounding of her heart couldn’t penetrate Lyra’s mind as she stared down at the man who was once the boy who owned her heart.
Standing at the center of the blood-soaked sand, armed and challenging everything she had finally accepted. Kade.
He was here. In the flesh. For her.
But he wasn’t the boy she had known. He wasn’t the boy who had run barefoot through the woods of Midnight Crest or skipped stones with her at Silver Lake. He had grown into a man. He was broad and tall, clearly muscled from years of fighting and survival. He was hard and scarred, nothing like the bright, reckless one she remembered.
Of course, she was not the girl
